Public Enemy’s Chuck D & Flavor Flav Blast April Fool’s Day

The Hip Hop community was up in arms after Chuck D and the rest of Public Enemy announced Flavor Flav had been kicked out of the pioneering group last month. What initially began as a legitimate disagreement over a Bernie Sanders rally erupted into Flav’s immediate dismissal.

Suddenly, everyone was talking about it. #ChuckD was a trending Twitter topic. Every late night talk show host from Jimmy Fallon to Stephen Colbert was cracking jokes about it. Every major publication, including CNN, made the Public Enemy split a headline. Miraculously, the general public somehow became experts on the inner workings of the group overnight. More people were talking about Public Enemy than they had in years.

But it turns out — the public discourse between the two longtime group members was ultimately a hoax, or as Chuck calls it, “the hoax that ain’t no joke.”

In an exclusive interview with hitmusic, Chuck explains what drove him to this point.

“Going into 2020, this is the second decade where Hip Hop has skidded away to the point where the good look is never, ever considered and the bad look keeps getting elevated to the point where it’s just disrespectful,” he tells DX. “I had to figure out, ‘What is the teachable moment for me?’

“I think Jadakiss talked about it in his Ignatius album — it’s like, we can’t have dead rappers be the news that comes out that elevates them to the top. When does the good look get a look? When I saw Common do his performance at the NBA All-Star Weekend, I thought it was the greatest performance I’d ever seen a Hip Hop artist do on TV — and no one said anything.”

He continues, “The final straw for me was the young man Pop Smoke being murdered, and all of a sudden he becomes a name. It was reminiscent of the year before with Nipsy Hussle, somebody who I played and supported on our RAPstation networks. A few people knew his name but then he gets murdered and of all a sudden it’s this ground swell. The blogs, platforms and all Hip Hop media, I felt they were heavily negligent and started to hover like buzzards waiting for the worst thing to happen.”

A post shared by kyleeustice (@kyleeustice) on May 2, 2019 at 4:35pm PDT

But this was all part of the plan. Chuck acknowledges people are going to say “all kinds of things.”

“They’re going to ask Flav a whole bunch of questions he can’t answer,” he says. “I told him it’s got to be revealed on April 1 or people might say, “Chuck probably realized that he made a bad decision halfway through. He probably just said, ‘Yo man, this is a bad look for me.’

“You’re god damn right it’s a bad look. I made it a bad look intentionally. I’ve made an illustrated diary from February all the way up to April 1 and it’s called, There’s A Poison Going On, and it’s 100 illustrated pictures of what I’ve done since the Bernie Sanders rally. You can’t come up with an illustrated fucking book in two weeks.”

Now, Public Enemy and Enemy Radio are looking to the future. Flav is actually in the studio right now working on the final five songs for the next Public Enemy album that’s expected to arrive in June. Enemy Radio — Chuck, Bay Area MC Jahi, DJ Lord and the SW1s — has a new album dropping on Wednesday (April 1) called Loud Is Not Enough, a statement on some of the mainstream rap currently flooding the airwaves.